'Castle doctrine' doesn't prevent pain

She sat in the front row clutching a rosary as the man who shot her son to death went on trial for murder.

During especially intense moments — the removal of State's Exhibit No. 52, a .40-caliber Glock handgun, from an envelope, for example — the clattering of beads quickened. When a photograph of her son's body appeared on the screen overhead, she turned away in tears as her husband and other family members reached for her.

Carmen Glass sat beside her husband, Burnell, as the trial opened for Ray Lemes, a Northwest Side homeowner who is claiming a “castle doctrine” defense in the August 2007 shooting of Tracy Glass, 19, an unarmed college student from San Angelo. In Texas, a person is legally justified in shooting someone who enters his home with nefarious intent.

Some reports have suggested Glass might've gone to the wrong house. He was staying with his sister in an unfamiliar neighborhood and was legally drunk. Lemes' house looked similar.

The hint of a tragic mistake is what caught my eye. It took me back two decades, to a case involving a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student who was shot to death in Baton Rouge, La. He died after mistaking the home of a man named Rodney Peairs for the scene of a party he was looking for. The man yelled “Freeze!” but the student, Yoshihiro Hattori, didn't speak English well. He kept moving and Peairs shot him.

That case caused a sensation in Japan, where guns are rare. On a 1992 journalism fellowship to Japan, I interviewed Mieko Hattori, the boy's mother. Sitting near a shrine to her son at her home in Nagoya, she said she had no ill feelings toward America but didn't understand why guns are so necessary here.

My point is not to suggest that Japanese culture is better, only that we can learn from the comparison. By the laws of our land, Lemes and Peairs — who was later acquitted of manslaughter — have the right to own guns, and to defend themselves. But let's not get so carried away with frontier justice that we lose track of how much heartbreak can be inflicted when someone dies who perhaps shouldn't have had to.

Lemes' fate will turn on how far he went, and whether a jury thinks his actions meet the legal test for self-defense. Among other things, jurors will decide whether they think Glass actually entered Lemes' house.

What's clear in both cases, though, is that a mother's son lost his life — and that she and her family will spend years sorting through the consequences. Right now that means sitting in a courtroom listening to people suggest her son was up to no good.

That's something we may never know for sure, but it doesn't diminish the hurt. Glass and her husband are cotton farmers, sustained through all that has happened by their faith. In her only face-to-face encounter with Lemes, she told him she prayed for him, too.

During my interview with Hattori, I asked why she thought her son's shooting had garnered so much attention in Japan. Her response chilled me then and chills me still.